CASE STUDY: The Priory GroupIT Service Automation Helps The Priory
Group Better Serve its Clients

Profile:Specializes in high-quality acute and complex mental
healthcare, addiction treatment, and low- and mediumsecurity facilities

Location:
United Kingdom

Industry:
Healthcare

Website:The Priory Group is best known for
Roehampton hospital, the choice of manycelebrities seeking addiction treatment. As aleading provider of behavioural health in theUK, The Priory supports the health and wellbeing needs of more than 30,000 people everyyear. It operates a network of 400 facilities that
support healthcare, education and children
services, and adult care services. The Priory
prides itself on putting people first and acting
as a family to support colleagues and service
users, and strives to constantly improve theservices it provides.

www.priorygroup.com

Solutions:§ Ivanti Service Manager

Benefits:§ Deliver IT service requests and fix issues faster§ Automate IT support to gain efficiencies for a growing

business§ Rapidly replace an outdated ticketing system with anenterprise service management platform

Reputation for Excellence
The Priory, which offers private and NHS mental healthservices, has been expanding both in the UK andinternationally. As it served more people in more locations,
The Priory outgrew its IT helpdesk ticketing system, which
supports its employees and service users. In six years, theIT service desk expanded from two people to 30 agentshandling 400 tickets a day. With an aging ticketing system
no longer supported by the vendor, IT needed to make achange—and fast.

www.ivanti.com

CASE STUDY: The Priory GroupSarah Nash, IT support specialist, led The Priory’stransformation to using an enterprise-class service
management platform. Sarah and her colleagues evaluatedthree leading service management platforms and chose todeploy Ivanti Service Manager. With Service Manager, The
Priory has a modern approach to service management thatblends best practices with configurable tools to deliver IT
services at a higher quality and lower cost.
Service Manager provides a complete lifecycle approach toservice management but is intuitive enough that nontechnical business managers can design services with dragand-drop ease. For The Priory employees, the experience isalso intuitive—a “one-stop shop” for all IT service needs.
Sarah notes that she particularly liked the web interface,which makes Service Manager accessible from almost any
connected device.

Rapid Time-to-Value
The Priory wasted no time replacing its old ticketing system.
“I hear lovely stories that people take six months toimplement Service Manager,” says Sarah. “Between
blueprint and build took three weeks, and allowing one week
to test, we went live on the fifth week.”
Even more impressive was that Sarah got The Priory up andrunning on Service Manager with no formal training. Afterthe Ivanti solution architect created the blueprint, shejumped in with both feet. “We didn’t sink. We swam,” shesays. For ongoing enhancements, Sarah makes heavy useof an external staging site to learn new capabilities as therollout progresses. “Having a development area is very
important.”

www.ivanti.com“Implementing Ivanti Service Manager has
increased the efficiency of the IT team,consolidating processes and supporting us in
our ISO27001 accreditation, which weachieved following the implementation”
Claire Dunn, IT Director

Better, More Efficient IT Support
One of the biggest culture changes was getting accustomedto incidents and service requests, which were notdistinguished under the old system. “It was a learning curvefor IT as a department, but it has made it easier for theusers,” says Sarah.
Service requests are tied tightly to the business value. “Ifsomeone makes a request, it generally has a monetary orsecurity requirement,” she says. Each location has a site
authority, who might be a human resources manager, ahome manager, hospital director or a school principal. Siteauthorities access the Service Manager self-service
catalogue, where they can choose from a menu of service
requests and can track their service requests in a singleview. “The self-service portal is very well-used,” she says.
“We have dealt with 2,500 service requests since our go-live
date in August 2016. “The Priory uses automation to speed the delivery of a broad
range of IT service processes. One of the first workflows to
be automated was a new user request, either for anemployee or a service user. The request encompasses
multiple steps, such as setting up user accounts andaccess, configuring applications, and streaming tasks toinfrastructure and purchasing teams as required, all of which
are now sequenced appropriately.
The user reaction has been positive. “We got very good
feedback on the new user request process from the site
authorities,” she says. “Everything they needed was in oneplace.” And that’s a real time-saver when there are inexcess of 50 new-user requests a day.”Prior to Service Manager, the site authority filled out a form,
but IT often had to call back to get more information. The
service desk had tried to accelerate the painstaking manual
process by creating tickets for other teams to complete therequest. “Sometimes one request could generate five

CASE STUDY: The Priory Grouptickets, all for different teams so each could progress theirpart separately. It was confusing for our users and us.”“With Ivanti Service Manager, we’re 90 percent better thanwe were before,” says Sarah.

One factor that built trust at the outset of the project was theIvanti account manager, who put the customer first. “Hewould tell us if something was wrong, and I respect that inpeople,” says Sarah. That relationship has only
strengthened over time. She also appreciates having ahighly responsive Ivanti support team based in Ireland.
“Between myself, our SQL development team and the Ivantisupport crew, I’ve managed to get everything I need,” shesays.
Claire Dunn, The Priory’s group IT director, adds:“Implementing Ivanti Service Manager has increased theefficiency of the IT team, consolidating processes andsupporting us in our ISO27001 accreditation, which weachieved following the implementation.”

Looking Ahead
With Service Manager, The Priory has a platform that will
scale and adapt as its business continues to expand and as
it matures its IT service management processes. The
service desk handles about 400 tickets a day, and thevolume is growing.
The IT department plans to add Change Management tobetter manage, track and optimize IT changes later thisyear. “Change management is a huge culture change in ourpeople’s minds, but it’s necessary.” Also planned is Problem
Management to address root causes proactively andminimize the effects of problems on the business. Release
Management is also planned to improve the quality ofhardware and software rollouts.

www.ivanti.com“With Ivanti Service Manager, we’re 90
percent better than we were before.”
Sarah Nash, IT Support Specialist

www.ivanti.com
1.800.982.2130
sales@ivanti.com
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